Some years ago, I reported on a self-defense/gun-safety class mainly for women at Rice University.

There had been several forcible rapes on the Houston, Texas, campus. Students had armed themselves. The instructor was an Army ROTC officer. A Vietnam combat veteran, he found the prospect of undergraduates packing heat unsettling, but reasoned that if they were arming themselves anyway, some training was better than none. Unlike many entrepreneurs teaching concealed-carry classes from sea to shining sea, he urged students to leave their guns at home. He stressed that he couldnt turn them into infantry soldiers with a few sessions in a gym basement. Even most armed assailants, he explained, arent hell-bent upon murder. They use weapons to control their victims.

Anybody pulling a gun must shoot to kill without hesitation. The soldier reasoned that most Rice students simply werent prepared to do that; hence, the likeliest outcome was that criminals would end up murdering them with their own guns. Heightened awareness, avoiding lonely places at night and pepper spray or Mace would afford more safety than the illusion of power conveyed by a 9 mm semi-automatic.

Our instructor further advised that shotguns are the weapon of choice for home defense. Unlike a heavycaliber handgun, a shotgun will put an intruder out of business without a bullet passing through a wall and killing a sleeping child.

He emphasized that anybody suspecting a nighttime home invasion should first perform a thorough bed checka procedure that saved me from potential catastrophe one night after my teen-age son and a friend sneaked out to howl at the moon under a maidens window at 2 a.m., leaving an open back door and a halfdozen beagles running through the house.

Creeping back home, the lads overheard me shucking shells from my 20-gauge pump, an unmistakably chilling sound. Fearing that burglars had taken us hostage, they were subsequently apprehended in headlong flight up the street. Theyd been running for help, they explained.

Would I have shot an unknown intruder? I believe so. Im also glad Ive never had to face the choice. Killing a human being, almost regardless of provocation, is nothing like hunting game. Never mind legal peril. Contrary to action/adventure films, psychological fallout can be severe.

Anyway, we students next proceeded to the firing range for lessons in loading, unloading and blasting paper targets.

If you can point your finger, I wrote, you can learn to kill, an observation that annoyed almost as many gun fanciers as this column will. Maybe I should have said that I was already fairly good with a shotgun and had spent half my life aiming balls at things.

Anyway, heres the thing: In the wake of the Tucson tragedy, handgun advocates argue that a well-armed private citizen could have saved lives by putting a decisive end to a gunmans mad act. Never mind that Arizona has the most permissive gun laws in the country. Indeed, no laws had been broken until U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was shot in the head at pointblank range.

Ah, but there was an armed bystander. His name is Joe Zamudio, and he bravely helped subdue Jared Loughner without firing a shot. But Zamudio has admitted how close he came to shooting the heroic retired Army colonel who reportedly wrested the pistol from the alleged shooters hands when he paused to reload. Thanks to a 30-round ammo clip, he had gotten off 31 shots in 15 seconds. Fifteen seconds! Everything was chaos and terror.

In reality, as Americans seem fated to experience again and again without learning anything:

A gunman walks into a Detroit police station and shoots four cops before himself being killed. Two cops serving a warrant in St. Petersburg, Fla., are killed and a U.S. marshal wounded by a suspect who escapes. Two sheriffs deputies are shot at a Wal-Mart near Seattle before a third officer kills their assailant, whose motives remain unknown. A policeman in Waldport, Ore., is shot by an unknown assailant during a routine traffic stop. He remains in critical condition. At another routine stop, an Indianapolis cop is shot four times, twice in the face. Hes in critical condition, too. All of these events occurred within 24 hours between Jan. 23 and 24.

Its worth emphasizing that the 11 victims were trained, experienced law enforcement officers. But their assailants, whod found semi-automatic weapons easier to acquire than whiskey, gave them no chance.

Meanwhile, National Rifle Association fundamentalists pretend that America will be a freer, safer place if more poorly trained, inexperienced, unfit, would-be Bruce Willis heroes were waddling around shopping malls carrying pistols.

Theres a word for people who cling to absurd beliefs against massive evidence. Theyre called cultists, and theyre currently in charge.

Arkansas Democrat-Gazette columnist Gene Lyons is a National Magazine Award winner and co-author of "The Hunting of the President" (St. Martin's Press, 2000). You can e-mail Lyons at eugenelyons2@yahoo.com.

There are so many falsehoods that you could dissect this article sentence by sentence. Just goes to show you that the gungrabbers are STILL out there and want to disarm you IOT establish their Communist Utopia.

I didn’t realize the whole point of self defense was to be an “infantry soldier”?

That said, that former soldier would have his ass handed to him in a one-on-one situation with a well-trained gun owner. Infantry skills do not make one a super soldier or a pistoleer, and using this one guy as a real-life “straw man” is a specious argument.

You are absolutely correct that the number of falsehoods and inaccuracies in this so-called article is beyond comprehension. The author abruptly flips from rape scenario to a peculiar bullet passing through wall and striking a child notion practically in the same sentence. What a truly bizarre collection of ideas that the writer somehow believes creates an understandable narrative.

"Anybody pulling a gun must shoot to kill without hesitation. The soldier reasoned that most Rice students simply werent prepared to do that; hence, the likeliest outcome was that criminals would end up murdering them with their own guns. Heightened awareness, avoiding lonely places at night and pepper spray or Mace would afford more safety than the illusion of power conveyed by a 9 mm semi-automatic."

I have to say I tend to agree with this statement if young college aged girls are included in this statement.

Many thugs would run away if they saw a young woman pull a gun out, but those that didn't would be the ones who would become incredibly violent in a fight/flight scenario and would kill you if you hesitated for a split second.

Either that or these lawsuit conscious kids just plain missed because they truly didn't believe it when they were told that hitting a moving human at 10 feet in the dark while scared to death is not at all a guaranteed kill like the paper targets at the range are.

Eugene Aloysius Lyons (AKA Gene Lyons)is a flame-thrower of the first magnitude. He knows not civility or subdued rhetoric or truth. I quick taking our local newspaper primarily due to the fact that it featured Alo-ishi-us in their OpEd page every Sunday.

I wrote rebuttals (which were always printed), and made phone calls to the editorial staff to replace him with ANYBODY else. But to no avail. So the subscription was cancelled.

Hollywood is filled with gun grabbers. They don’t understand weapons and make movies featuring all sorts of absurd gunplay that would never work off camera. It’s always a little surreal to see other gun grabbers criticize the unreality of Hollywood’s portrayal.

“Heightened awareness, avoiding lonely places at night and pepper spray or Mace would afford more safety than the illusion of power conveyed by a 9 mm semi-automatic.”

Heightened awareness is always a good thing. Pepper spray or mace are illusions of self defense, and only in the illogical mind of an anti gun tyrant is the discussion about “illusions of power”.

Liberal solutions to avoiding becoming a victim of violent criminals always boils down to hiding in your room or traveling in a pack like hyenas hoping to be the last one eaten. It's not very comforting when you're in the crocodiles mouth and have no means of escape.

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